Friday Stuff

David Doel tells us about more info seeping out as to the potential reasons why “Tuckums” was given the boot over at Fix Noise, all of which are interesting I have to admit...my guess is that it was “accumulated offenses,” which is a phrase I first heard in high school when the teacher wanted to give you demerits but he/she couldn’t come up with a reason why, and the Dominion lawsuit (which isn’t the end of the legal problems for that network, let’s not forget) is a big “offense” for all concerned (more here...also, I thought this was a really good video from Chris Hayes about right-wing media, including Carlson's former network of course, contributing to fear and panaoia, but YouTube won't let me embed it here, which is typically stoo-pid)...



...and it seems like we can’t get through a week any more without some occurrence of ridiculous hateful behavior from either Marjorie Trailer Park Greene or Bo-Bo Boebert, and in this case, the former berates AFT teachers’ union head Randi Weingarten over her personal life as a stepmother and trying to keep our kids from dying during the pandemic...yeah, as Mike Figueredo says, I guess Greene thinks kids were sitting at home bored and just said, “Oh, I think I’ll transition”...what a numbskull Greene is (NSFW/H at the very end - Lesley Stahl should feel like an utter fool for legitimizing this guttural harpie)...



...and Thom Hartmann had what I thought was an interesting idea here given all of the SCOTUS garbage with Almost Silent Clarence Thomas and now Gorsuch, and that was to require that any rulings involving questions of constitutionality be unanimous, like what happens in Belgium, France, Italy, Germany and Spain, which would knock the High Court of Hangin’ Judge JR off its damn pedestal, though it might also tie the hands of a liberal SCOTUS majority if we ever see that again – personally, I’d be happy with expanding the court to 13 justices and imposing term limits, to say nothing of attaching criminal penalties for the types of non-disclosure Thomas is guilty of with his best bud Harlan Crow...



Update: And it looks like Hangin' Judge JR has some 'splaining to do also, you might say (here).

...and this clip from More Perfect Union tells us that the residents of El Paso, Texas are trying to fight polluters with a “climate charter” (more here – also NSFW/H at the end, but a lot of important stuff before that)...



...and keeping with the theme of how garbage Republican policies affect everyday people, Desi Lydic of The Daily Show tells how folks in Kentucky really feel about anti-trans, anti-abortion and anti-gun control laws (also mildly NSFW/H)...



....and if I’m going to include this tune, I’d better hurry up, so here it is.

Thursday Stuff

Jayar Jackson and Dan Evans of Rebel HQ bring us the story of quack surgeon general Dr. Joseph Ladapo of Flori-DUH!, who was caught changing a study to make COVID vaccines look more dangerous than they are (here)...Ladapo should lose his license at a minimum, and as far as I’m concerned, he should also be prosecuted, but since we’re talking about Ron #DeathSantis-stan, he’ll likely get a medal and a raise instead...



...and speaking of “The Sunshine State,” it looks like “the mouse” has had enough and is hauling #DeathSantis into court; yeah, the FLA guv ended up giving Disney a lot of legal ammunition by yelling about how the company is “woke” in his book (John and Farron Cousins tell us about it...and yeah, big surprise that Disney is using the corporate speech angle to go after #DeathSantis, huh? And great point by Cousins about the timing of going after #DeathSantis when he’s weakest...couldn’t happen to a more deserving scumbag)...



...and Mike Figueredo beings us the tale of this monster named Jake Shields calling for the public execution of anyone helping kids to transition (and yeah, “Apartheid Clyde” and his Twitter butchery of the whole ”blue check” process are definitely a factor here...NSFW/H)...



...and Jesse Dollemore tells us how Dem U.S. House Leader Hakeem Jeffries recently stood up and called out the “party of Lincoln” over their debt histrionics, which (as noted previously) only happens when the “R” party runs at least one chamber of Congress and a Dem is in the White House...



...and given this week’s news of certain cable TV personalities getting ushered out, Rachel Maddow gives us what I thought was an interesting history lesson on Father Charles Coughlin from the 1930s and his influence on public opinion during the years of FDR and the Great Depression...this leads into a discussion of the decline of right-wing mouthpieces including Limbaugh, Beck, O’Reilly and Carlson and how none of them, big as they were, match Coughlin’s influence in his day...



...and happy belated 70th birthday to Gary Wright.

Wednesday Stuff

Brian Tyler Cohen discusses some Texas state senator named Phil King (a Repug of course) who sponsored a bill to have the Ten Commandments displayed in public schools, and of course it passed (as well as charter schools making kids pray and study the Bible) – as noted here, this was tried in Alabama, but a law passed in that state ended up discouraging this practice, fortunately (important history lesson from Cohen on this, and more on the Lemon Test is here)...



...and Desi Lydic of The Daily Show has some fun with some recent news stories, including the fall of “Tuckums” of course, and this “Real Women of Politics” nuttiness, as well as the demise of Bed, Bath and Beyond with Roy Wood, Jr (mildly NSFW/H)...



Update 4/27/23: More on The Swanson TV Dinner Heir is here.

...and the last clip was amusing IMO when it comes to making fun of Republicans, but this is serious stuff, and that is the campaign against Montana state rep Zooey Zephyr, as Ana and Cenk of TYT tell us (more here)...



...and Sam and Emma of The Majority Report tell us that 15-vote U.S. House Speaker Repug Kevin McCarthy wants to impose a work requirement for the poors of course related to food assistance, which would screw over, among others, our veterans who the “party of Lincoln” claim to love (more here)...



...and I should note that I generally try not to pay a lot of attention to Dennis Prager since I consider him to be some of the lowest of the low-hanging fruit, but as Jesse Dollemore tells us here, it looks like Prager (in an admittedly sleepy way) seems to be saying “OH YEAH, YOU FILTHY LIB? OUR SLAVERY WAS WAY BETTER THAN MUSLIM SLAVERY! U-S-A! U-S-A!”...



...and Adrienne Lawrence of Rebel HQ informs us that Almost Silent Clarence Thomas now has a partner when it comes to financial irregularities let’s say, and that would be Neil Gorsuch, who just got flagged for doing some kind of a deal with Lawrence’s former law firm (the SCOTUS justice reported the sale of a property on his disclosure forms, but he didn’t report that the buyer was Brian Duffy of Greenberg Traurig, which frequently argues before the High Court it seems)...gee, what a shame that there’s no precedence for a SCOTUS justice being forced to resign for unethical financial behavior – oh wait, there is! Actually, this pales in comparison to the Thomas stuff, but Lawrence is right...Gorsuch should have cited that Duffy of G-T was the buyer in the transaction, and there should be SCOTUS rules about this sort of thing (particularly since Hangin’ Judge JR is going to blow off the Senate Judiciary Committee again as noted here..all of which lends credence to this IMO, and yes, I know the prospects are bleak on that one)...



...and Kyle Kulinski gives us the results of some poll telling us that a fraction of the Repug base wants to fight “woke” ideology more than protect Social Security and Medicare cuts, which, to me, means that these people are too damn stoo-pid for their own bleeping good (I thought this was a pretty good analysis from Kyle, particularly on Guv #DeathSantis – yeah, compared to Our Ochre Abomination, the head of Flori-DUUUH! is pretty much hitting the metaphorical wall from an electoral point of view, but Kulinski loses me a bit by mentioning Briahna Joy Gray...and speaking of #DeathSantis, it looks the “the Mouse” has finally had enough as noted here)...



...and RIP Harry Belafonte, legendary actor and singer (I guess "all-around performer" would cover it) and, IMO, one of the greatest Democrats who ever lived (more here and here).

Tuesday Stuff

Well, well, it looks like “Tuckums” is OUTTA HERE, as former Phils announcer Harry Kalas likely would have put it...David Shuster offers a bit of a remembrance; we’ll just have to see which biped life form The Roger Ailes BS Factory decides to put in his place; I’m sure there are no shortage of humanoids clawing and scratching their way all over each other to try and land that “crowning jewel” of a prime time slot...here is my thought about this (which I’ll likely never be able to verify of course); Rupert The Pirate told Carlson he had to apologize on air for the Dominion stuff and he said he wouldn’t do it, so he went buh-bye (more here and some interesting stuff about Carlson's departure is here)...



...and this prior clip form Joy Reid tells us about Carlson and all the “race lady” stuff...if The Swanson TV Dinner Heir had had any guts, he would have just said the “N” word instead since that’s surely what he really wanted to do (and it’s not like it would have hurt him with his elderly boomer white bread audience – they probably would have given him better ratings for it)...



...and I think the prior two clips are pretty good set-ups for this from Second Thought, in which we learn that You’re Not Immune to Propaganda...good job to mention Edward Bernays and how his methods of persuasion in advertising were used by non-benign political actors tied to neoliberalism, and I honestly didn’t know about Bernays’s link to United Fruit – “neoliberal propaganda communicates the most shallow and meaningless definitions of freedom and democracy” indeed...I have to admit that I also didn’t know about the Macron quote where he said “just cross the street and you’ll find work” to the unemployed French dude..sacre bleu!...



...and as David Doel tells us here, another “head rolled,” you might say, in the corporate media biz, and that was Don Lemon of CNN...how telling is it that Lemon confronted a conservative on air and was given the boot for it, and that was indeed a particularly ridiculous lie from Vivek Ramaswamy about the NRA and the second amendment allegedly aiding the civil rights struggle (more here), and to say that to an African American like Lemon was in singularly bad taste IMO...as I’ve said repeatedly for what it’s worth, the worst thing you can do in media is piss off a conservative, and I get the whole “access” thing, but that’s still no excuse...lying and embellishment (see Brian Williams and an alleged Iraqi helicopter ride), not so much in terms of being allowed to keep your job – “if you want sunshine and rainbows, watch Teletubbies”...nicely done...



...and turning to the latest developments regarding Our Treasonous Orange Pustule who continues to walk amongst us as a free man (and this was a particularly revolting recent story IMO), Farron Cousins tells us that Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg is allowing Gym Jordan to send a subpoena to former prosecutor Mark Pomerantz, meaning that Pomerantz will testify in front of Jim Jordan's Judiciary Committee; Bragg may have done this because he understands that this is only going to end badly for Jordan since a lot of stuff the Gropenfuhrer wasn’t charged on under former Manhattan prosecutor Cy Vance and Pomerantz may end up getting read into the Congressional record – womp womp...



...and sometimes I need a tune to mellow out a bit after a morning of driving on the PA Turnpike and the “blue route” in these parts (long story), so I now offer the following.

Monday Stuff

Farron Cousins tells us that this Texas Repug state senator named Drew Springer wants to make it illegal to file three or more environmental complaints about energy companies (or ANY company, it sounds like) in that state that don’t result in an enforcement action (and yeah, good luck with that...how this ISN’T a violation of the First Amendment is something I cannot imagine...and in case anyone thinks I’m deliberately ignoring blue-state Repug idiocy, allow me to present this)...



...and this More Perfect Union video tells us that Arizona is “ground zero” in the war on public schools (not sure why they used that green caption text, but that’s a minor criticism, along with that “Turning Point Academy” typo...report has to do with $$ taken from funding for public schools to go to these private charter schools instead, with a typical unholy alliance between the Walton family in Arkansas and the DeVos family in Michigan, as we learn from the clip...I didn’t know about the ways that people like the DeVos and Walton families can “make bank” at the expense of educating our kids, to say nothing of that nematode Charlie Kirk, but as nauseating as it is, I guess I really shouldn’t be surprised)...



...and speaking of The Grand Canyon State, it looks like “Curtsy Kyrsten” is livin’ large all right, to the tune of 100K (at least) on that sweet, sweet donor cash (and to think, there were individuals out there getting big mad over people who once chased her into a bathroom stall – there’s a word in the English language called P-E-R-S-P-E-C-T-I-V-E! Maybe the people defending Sinema – maybe one or two – should bother to look it up...John and Brett Erlich tell us more)...



...and here’s a shocker...it’s “Banana Republican” Bri-Fi poking his head out of his hidey hole long enough to misuse the term “Democrat” (which is a noun, not a f*king adjective, you assclown) and yammer about the debt ceiling...of course, like everyone else in the “Trump party,” he voted for the Gropenfuhrer’s utterly ruinous tax cut in December 2017 and had not a word to say about “THE DEBT! THE DEBT!” when he did that, but of course now that we have a Democrat-IC president, he pretends to be fiscally prudent (to do something about that, click here...and don’t get me started on Josh Gottheimer)...



Update 4/26/23: Hey, whaddaya know? It looks like Harlan (I Bought Clarence Thomas’s House For Six Figures) Crow gave donations to Bri-Fi’s beloved “No Labels,” as noted here.

Care to comment, Bri? I didn’t think so.

..and Jesse Dollemore informs us that Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin has sent a letter to SCOTUS Chief Justice Roberts about Almost Silent Clarence Thomas’s antics and Roberts appearing before Durbin’s committee (and it seems like, based on this, Hangin’ Judge JR is going to blow off Durbin once again)...



...and heading back below that Mason-Dixon line, as long as this state is going to pull nonsense like this, I’m going to keep including this tune.